Oldest Royal Wine Cellar Uncorked in Israel

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Archaeologists have uncovered the oldest known palatial wine
cellar in the Middle East at a site in Israel.

The storage room stocked at least 3,000 bottles' worth of the
intoxicating beverage in massive pottery jars, researchers report
today (Nov. 22) at the annual meeting of the American Schools of
Oriental Research in Baltimore. The
ancient wine bore little resemblance to the Bordeaux and
Chianti of today — it was preserved and spiced with resin and
herbs, including juniper, mint and myrtle.

The closest modern analogue is a Greek wine flavored with
pine resin called retsina, study researcher Assaf Yasur-Landau of
the University of Haifa, told reporters.

"If you take retsina and you pour a bit of cough syrup inside, I
guess you get something quite similar," Yasur-Landau said.

The wine storage room is at a site called Tel Kabri in northern
Israel, where archaeologists are unearthing the remains of a
sprawling palace dating back to about 1700 B.C. that was built
and occupied by the Canaanites.

The palace was destroyed around 1600 B.C. by a sudden cataclysm,
possibly an earthquake. It may have been this earthquake
that crushed the wine storage room, leaving toppled jars for
archaeologists to uncover.

The researchers were digging in a spot they believed to be
outside the palace walls in July when they came across a large
jar about 3 feet (1 meter) tall, on its side. They dubbed the jar
"Bessie" and started excavating it. By the time Bessie was free
from the dirt, the team had found 39 other jars surrounding it.
They estimate that the jars were held in a storage room measuring
about 16 feet by 26 feet (5 m by 8 m). Together, the 40 jars
could have held about 2,000 liters (500 gallons) of wine, the
team said.

"We knew we had to get them out," said study researcher Eric
Cline, an archaeologist at The George Washington University. Had
the jars been left in place over the winter, Cline said, they
never would have survived.

At the excavation site, Brandeis University researcher Andrew
Koh, who specializes in archaeological chemistry, took shards of
the pots and carefully boiled them in solvents to extract any
organic material that had soaked into the clay. He then took the
resulting solutions back to the United States and chemically
analyzed them to determine what the jars held. The project was
unusually thorough in that the researchers tested all 40 jars,
not just a sample of one or two.

The results revealed a luxurious ancient concoction, Yasur-Landau
said. Tartaric and syringic acids, both hallmarks of wine, proved
that the jars indeed held vino. Resins would have helped
preserve the wines. If the
ancient wines were anything like retsina, the resins also
would have lent a distinctive turpentine flavor to the beverage.

Honey sweetened the wine, the researchers found, and juniper,
mint, cinnamon bark and other herbs flavored it. The jars were
remarkably consistent in their contents, suggesting that
winemakers were sticking to a recipe. The vesselsare plain and
without markings or labels to reveal their contents.

The storage room is next to a large hall that archaeologists
think was used for banquets. Cattle bones and other signs of meat
consumption have been found in the palace, Yasur-Landau said. The
Canaanite leader who lived in the compound may have entertained
foreign guests in the hall. The palace contains Aegean art, and
the wine includes imported ingredients, pointing to
maritime trade around the Mediterranean.

Doors from the storage room may lead to at least one other
storage chamber, but the area has yet to be excavated, the
researchers said.

Texts from the ancient town of Mari, Syria, describe herbed wines
from this time period, Yasur-Landau said.